Review Roundup: Gobs and Gobs of Gottlieb

One good thing about books like Lori Gottlieb’s “Marry Him: Why You Should Take the Squint-Eyed, Red-Haired Leprechaun Lurking in the Corner Into Your Bed” (or something like that) is that they can spark a conversation among reviewers that ends up being useful to society, even if the books themselves are a blight. But before I jump into the reviews, here’s a brief assessment: “Marry Him” (which, for the few readers who might not have heard, urges women to stop looking for Mr. Right and settle for Mr. Right Now) is an attempt by Gottlieb to plumb the depths of her own shallowness. Noble, perhaps, but impossible. You know how, in college, students are asked to write a paper on a particular book, and some will write a good paper and some won’t, because they won’t have seen anything interesting in, say, “The Golden Bowl”—they’ll just have been bored and annoyed, even though “The Golden Bowl” contains multitudes? Gottlieb’s like this, only instead of literature she’s been trying to read people, and getting no farther than their bow ties (or the aforementioned red hair). And now she’s handed in her paper, a self-help book that starts from the premise that all females share her shortsightedness, and which has, approximately, a zero-per-cent chance of helping anyone. It may be no more fair to judge Gottlieb for her inabilities than it is to judge a well-intentioned student who works hard but can’t write an A paper, but then again, Gottlieb seems to be quite comfortable passing judgment on us unmarried career gals. Lucky for me, I have a thing for both bow ties and red hair, which I think makes me exempt. Lucky for Gottlieb, life is not college, and it sometimes richly rewards the D student.

And with that, here’s a roundup of responses to the book worth reading:

Liesl Schillinger is at her brilliant best on The Daily Beast: “Gottlieb moans about the misery of the sad, pathetic single woman, stuck at home with Netflix. But what of the misery of the sad, pathetic, partnered woman, stuck at home with a somnolent spouse or boyfriend who sits around watching TV and eating Chunky soup and won’t let her play her Netflix?”

Amy Finnerty misses the mark, and internalizes Gottlieb’s self-loathing, in the Times Book Review: “She convinces us that we women are simply too fussy, entitled and downright delusional about our own worth in the mating marketplace. We overanalyze and seek undiluted sexual and intellectual fulfillment, thus setting men up for failure.”

Ashley Sayeau makes an important, troubling point about why a book like this gets published, in the Guardian: “If you’re a female writer today your best bet at making it is to write this sort of book—one that forgoes nuance and thoughtfulness for ‘controversy’ and ‘counter-intuitiveness,’ a book, that is, that claims to be about empowering women, but is actually aimed mostly at pissing off feminists, that supposedly dying breed whom publishers nevertheless need to get things going.”

And Jessica Grose keeps things sensible on Slate: “To paraphrase H.L. Mencken, nobody ever went broke underestimating the anxiety women feel about getting married. Gottlieb’s merely capitalizing on that panic—even though all the statistics show that the women she’s writing about probably get hitched eventually. Instead of buying Gottlieb’s book, all those ambitious women should take the $20 and buy a few cocktails before they’re completely domesticated.”